As January ushers in its colder weather sided with snow, I sadly look at the empty laundry lines hanging outside my tiny Milwaukee apartment. My thoughts turned to what some of us entitle "the simpler times" and debate the task of laundry for the common woman of the Victorian time period in my mind.

How many of you are familiar with this poem or variations of it? (recited to me by my grandmother)..." Monday is wash day, Tuesday for ironing, Wednesday we sew, Thursday to the market we go, Friday indoors we clean, Saturday is when we bake and glean, whilst Sunday we say we have a day of rest today."

According to research done by Ruth Goodman in the book Victorian Farm.."Doing the laundry took up about one-fifth of a Victorian woman's entire working life"! Many times the laundry process began on Saturday in between your other chores. This day would be when you would more than likely sort your laundry, check for repairs, treat the stains, and put it all to soak. Sunday being a day of rest, the items remained at the soak often in lye until around 4 a.m. Monday morning. Yes, I said about 4 a.m. unless you were doing laundry in the winter, then 2 or 3 a.m. would be better in order to get your wood fires burning and your water hot enough! Of course you were quite fortunate to have a summer or winter kitchen available to do the laundry. It certainly beat having to punch a hole in the ice at the local stream or pond to do one's laundry. Now the laundry day consists of different laundry processes depending upon the garment or clothing item being washed. Some items needed a simple (if you can call it that) hand wash while other items required upwards of 30 minutes per load of dollying! Now if the clothing were very soiled you can expect to dolly about 45 to 50 minutes per load. (A dolly is a wooden agitator...similar to our agitator in a modern wash machine of today.) After the dolly process there is the rinse process...then the boil process...then the rinse process again. For advice purposes it was said that a good housewife would do a third rinse to be assured the clothing was perfectly clean. Finally after the entire day has been used up with the washing, it was time to wring and hang the clothes out to dry. This would be quite challenging in the winter months so sometimes laundry was hung from a wooden contraption that hung close to the ceiling near the wood or coal stove to dry. This day would also consist of using the optical brighteners known as blue dye or bluing. Blue dye deceived the eye into thinking the white cloth was whiter by tinting it with a small blue hue. I bet in winter many a house wife would frown at the bluing process as her whites never seemed to appear as white as the snow!

For Tuesday, the task of starching begins. Most items were starched for durability and wear, so a batch of starch was made up and all the clothes needing to be starched were dipped in, wrung out, and hung again to dry. Now on Wednesday if the clothes were dry, it was time to iron. By later in the day Wednesday or nearer to Thursday depending upon the size of your laundry loads, and what needed to be ironed (which could be just about everything including your bed linens) you were finally putting the laundry away only to begin the process once again two days later!

What can we learn from the Victorian laundry process? First and foremost, we can certainly learn how to be thankful for our Maytag! The modern laundry method seems to possess very little physical investment, and takes much less time! Secondly, we can adopt some useful ideas that also help our environment along with our pocket book! Today's laundry uses a lot more laundry soap than what is really needed. Let's face it, laundry soap makers use a variation of harmful chemicals in their product and they wish to turn a profit; they are going to be generous in their advice on how much soap to use! A little soap actually would do the job quite nicely. Soap is really meant to dissolve oils and grease, the wash machine actually washes the clothes by forcing water through the fibers of the clothing. I make my own laundry soap and stain removers by using basic items I keep here in the home...things like lemon juice, washing soda, borax, vinegar, baking soda, even brandy! (click on the brandy link to see an excerpt of advice from Peterson's Magazine...).

"A woman's work is never done" is surely a true statement for the Victorian woman! We women of 2012 have much to be thankful for in comparison!